Cloud on System z Transforms Business

Organizations in every industry, regardless of size or geography, are embracing cloud computing to reduce the complexity and costs associated with traditional IT approaches. Forward-thinking enterprises are applying the transformative power of clouds (both public and private) to reinvent the way they do business to:

Capture new business value by empowering internal and external communities to define and create new offerings and services

Deliver IT without boundaries by enabling new IT and business processes that break down traditional silos and simplify access to information in order to deliver better business outcomes

Improve speed and dexterity by delivering new offerings and services more rapidly by creating new models of self-service and deployment

Changing How Business Is Done

IBM’s cloud computing on System z is changing how businesses use IT resources to drive down costs, improve service and manage risk. At the core level, System z virtualization and its shared-everything approach, combined with offering the industry’s highest levels of security and availability, provide an efficient cloud-deployment model for multi-tenancy environments.

For Linux workloads, zVM integration with IBM Tivoli cloud solutions allows customers to automate and manage virtual images and their applications. Because of the efficiency of the hardware, firmware and virtualization, a single Linux core (IFL) can typically host 30 to 40 virtual machines running Linux. If customers are interested in keeping each of their hosted solutions for each customer in a separate Linux image, they can host many customers with a single processor and use workload management to ensure service-level agreements (SLAs) are met.

With System z security, many service providers host different customers in the same image, including banks. System z scalability allows these providers to host thousands of images supporting millions of transactions per day. IBM customers have performed benchmarks that exceeded 15,000 transactions per second for banking applications.

One of a Kind

IBM zEnterprise is the industry’s only multi-architecture cloud solution with leading capabilities for optimizing workloads across heterogeneous operating systems and providing high levels of efficiency, manageability, scalability and security. While security remains the top concern for cloud adoption, IBM Service Management on System z provides unmatched visibility, control and automation to manage and protect your data while optimizing service delivery.

System z and zEnterprise is a multi-architecture platform that offers tighter integration between the database on System z and the applications that need access to that data but run on distributed architectures. As a result, clients can:

Accelerate deployment for new applications

More quickly detect problems and resolve them

Better share resources to balance business priorities, and

Minimize the risks associated with downtime of critical applications and systems

With zEnterprise, cloud providers have the option of building their own customized cloud infrastructure using the function-rich virtualization management infrastructure that can help build an environment that encourages innovation by simplifying and standardizing the underlying infrastructure.

Customers can create an efficient yet flexible IT foundation that supports the development and consumption of new services while delivering a high-quality experience, even in an environment where the demand is always changing.

Meet the Challenge

Organizations face many transformative challenges, including escalating customer, employee and partner expectations around the value of each interaction—self-service, personalization, real-time information and service. They must deal with an exponential increase in data, users, response time and connected devices, often with no corresponding increase in budget. On top of this looms the imperative to deliver higher-value products and services more rapidly than ever to remain competitive with customers and shareholders.

Fortunately, System z can provide a cost effective, easier-to-manage cloud solution that can transform new and existing mainframe resources into a cloud computing infrastructure that can be used to provide value add services to the enterprise. The power and elasticity of System z allows enterprise organizations to deploy a holistic approach to interoperability, resiliency, security and integrity that protect privacy, data and intellectual property, providing them with the core competencies needed to compete in the most demanding and unpredictable environments.

IBM Systems Magazine is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. The editorial content of IBM Systems Magazine is placed on this website by MSP TechMedia under license from International Business Machines Corporation.